The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9)

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Martha laughed. “There’s a small Degas drawing in one of the loos.”

  “Loos, too, can be made beautiful.”

  Martha frowned. “Have you heard of the open gardens weekend that they have round here?”

  “Yes. It arranges for private gardens—”

  “To be open to the public on a particular day. Exactly. And Munrowe House—that’s the name of their place: somewhat unimaginative, but accurate, I suppose—was opened to the public. The house too.”

  Isabel could tell what was coming. “And some of the paintings were …”

  “Stolen. Not some, just one. But, as it happened, it was the most valuable painting in the whole house. Duncan had been thinking of transferring it to the Gallery, where it would be safer, but he hadn’t got round to it.”

  “What was it?”

  “A Poussin. One of the relatively few in private hands in this country. And a rather nice one. It was worth about three million, they thought. Possibly more.”

  Isabel asked what the subject was, and Martha explained. It was a painting known as Time Reconsidered and bore some relationship to the artist’s great A Dance to the Music of Time. Martha began to describe that painting, but Isabel told her that she had visited the Wallace Collection in London and knew the picture well.

  “It was insured, of course,” Martha said.

  Isabel said that she was relieved to hear that. An insurance payment was not always full compensation for loss, but it undoubtedly dulled the pain. “I assume that what he really wants is to get the painting back.”

  “Yes. He does. They picked the one thing he didn’t want to lose.”

  Eddie appeared at the table to collect their empty cups. He took Martha’s wordlessly, but at the same time gave Isabel a look of gentle reproach. Isabel mentally sent him a message: Yes, I know what she’s like, but we can’t …

  “Anything else?” he asked Isabel.

  Isabel shook her head, and Eddie went back to the counter.

  “There’s something lost about that boy,” Martha said. “Odd.”

  Isabel did not engage. “Duncan Munrowe?”

  “Oh yes, Duncan. It’s the reward, you see.”

  Isabel looked puzzled. “The reward?”

  “I gather that many of these art thefts are really ransom attempts,” Martha explained. “They can’t sell these very well-known paintings—or at least not on the ordinary market—and so they use them to extort money from the insurance companies.”

  Isabel had read about this. “That must be difficult,” she said. “If you pay the Dane to go away, he always comes back. So perhaps you should make a point of never paying ransom.”

  Martha frowned at the mention of Danes.

  “Danegeld,” said Isabel. “It’s what people used to pay the Vikings to stop them destroying things. You paid your Danegeld and the Vikings went away. Until next time.”

  Martha shrugged. “I suppose there is a general issue about paying ransom. But that’s not the problem here—or at least it’s not the problem that’s worrying Duncan. His difficulty is the attitude of the insurers. They’ve suggested one thing and he’s wanted to do the other. They’ve argued about figures too. The insurers say that the market is depressed at the moment and this means they need to pay less. They also don’t want to pay a ransom until it’s clear that the painting won’t be recovered.”

  “Insurers are like that,” remarked Isabel. “As a general rule, if they can avoid paying, that’s what they’ll do.”

  “And yet we can’t be late with our premiums,” said Martha sharply.

  Isabel agreed. People were always very keen to have their bills paid promptly but were not so willing to reciprocate.

  “So that’s where you come in,” Martha announced.

  Isabel frowned. “I don’t see …”

  “Duncan wondered whether you might help him deal with this. In particular, he wants help in dealing with any approach from the people who have the painting. They’ll be in touch, he thinks. They might even have already contacted him—I’m not sure about that.”

  Isabel’s surprise was immediately apparent. “But what possible assistance can I give? I know nothing about this sort of thing. Nothing at all.”

  Martha laid a hand on Isabel’s forearm. “But everybody knows how helpful you are. That’s why I recommended you when he asked me about you.”

  “You recommended me?”

  “Yes. Poor Duncan: he so wanted somebody to talk to about it—to advise him. Somebody had mentioned your name. I said that you had quite a reputation for helping people in a tight spot and that he could talk to you. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Of course Isabel minded; it was very easy, she thought, to offer the services of others. But then she remembered her sainted American mother and asked herself how she would have reacted to such a request. She knew the answer. “Never turn your back on another,” her mother had said to her when she was a girl. “The person you’re turning your back on might die that night.” It was not, Isabel realised, the sort of thing one should say to children, who could feel unreasonably anxious about death anyway. And if somebody died, the child could well blame himself or herself; children often did that, the psychologists told us; they felt guilty about things that happened, even if they had nothing at all to do with them. I turned my back on her, and she went and died! But it was advice that had stuck, and came back to Isabel now, years later, in this difficult encounter. She stared at Martha. “I will, if you want me to,” she said. She almost added, “Though I can’t say I’m overly enthusiastic,” but decided against it. There was no need to be churlish.

  Martha looked at her gratefully. “Even if you just talk to him,” she said. “Listen to his tale of woe. Even that would help.”

  “I’ll try,” said Isabel.

  “Tomorrow?” asked Martha. “Duncan’s coming into town. Could you see him then? Lunch—just the three of us. Unless you’d rather I didn’t come.”

  Isabel hesitated. There were times when one had to act self-defensively, even if it caused disappointment. It went against the grain, but one had to.

  “Just him and me, I think,” she said. She tried to speak gently, but even then felt she had to explain. “It’s sometimes easier for people to talk if there’s nobody else there.”

  “Do you think so?” said Martha.

  “I do,” said Isabel.

  Martha shrugged. “Odd,” she said.

  It was true, thought Isabel, that none of us ever imagined that people might not wish to be in our company. We assumed that people found us good company, would like to be with us. But they might not. They might find us opinionated or dull or irritating—as poor Martha undoubtedly was; all of which qualities we would be the last to discern in ourselves.

  Isabel swallowed. It was so easy to forget the needs of others, and to allow irritation, boredom or sheer indifference to get the better of us. She would not do that; she would make an effort. It was very easy to build people up, to make them feel better about themselves: a few words of praise, an appreciative comment or two, and people felt better. Martha clearly took pains to look her best; perhaps a remark about that would help the situation.

  “I must say,” Isabel began, and then searched desperately for a suitable comment. “I must say that you’re looking really … really attractive. That top suits you, I think. Your colour.”

  She drew in her breath. The top was beige: she had just suggested that Martha’s colour was beige.

  “Beige?”

  “No,” said Isabel quickly. “I wouldn’t call it beige. I’d say oatmeal. I’ve got a carpet that colour in the upstairs bedroom and …” She trailed off as it struck her that she had now compared Martha’s top to a carpet.

  Martha stared at her for a moment before smiling wryly. “It’s kind of you to say that, Isabel, but I’m sure you don’t really mean it.”

  “I did mean it,” Isabel lied. And she thought, more than a little ashamedly: Kant would never, never
have given that answer. He would never have paid an insincere compliment in the first place. Kant would not have noticed the way a woman was dressed; Hume might have, and Voltaire certainly would. What the Great Philosophers Would Say About Your Wardrobe: that would be an amusing book to write—and it might even prove rather popular, as Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had become.

  She became aware that Martha was shaking an admonitory finger at her. “Not really, but thanks anyway. It’s good to be told nice things, even if they aren’t true.” She paused. “And it’s very kind of you to say it, especially when you’re so … Well, you’re much more glamorous than I am. And your life … your whole life is so much more—how shall I put it? Intense? And …”

  “Please,” said Isabel, reaching out to touch her gently. “That’s a generous thing to say, but you’re wrong, you know. My life isn’t really any different from anybody else’s.”

  Martha shook her head. “But it is! You’ve got money. You live in that fantastic house. You’ve got that man of yours. Everything. You’ve got everything.”

  Isabel looked down at the floor. It made her feel uncomfortable to hear her blessings enumerated—nobody welcomed that, least of all those who, like Isabel, were aware enough to know that all the good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant. The borderline between good fortune and disaster, between plenitude and paucity, between the warm hearth of love and the cold chamber of loneliness, was a narrow one. We could cross over from one to the other at any moment, as when we stumbled or fell, or simply walked over to the other side because we were paying insufficient attention to where we were. It was well to remember one’s good luck, but it was not always helpful to be reminded of it by one who was not equally blessed. Or to be reminded of it in public, when Nemesis, whose radar is said never to be switched off, picks up the echo and begins to take an interest.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARTHA LEFT THE DELICATESSEN, telling Isabel that she had other shops to visit before returning home to her lunch of onion tart. Isabel said goodbye to her but remained at the table; she had decided that she would read the newspaper, even if the only paper she could see on the rack was what looked like a three-day-old copy of the Corriere della Sera. Cat had the Italian newspapers passed on to her by a friend who bought them religiously to keep her language up to scratch. Isabel was the only beneficiary of this generosity; she had never seen anyone else reading the papers, although she had observed some customers examining them in puzzlement, trying to stretch their restaurant Italian or to make sense of the reports from the pictures. But their presence seemed just right: it went so well with the smell of coffee and the sight of the salamis that Cat hung above the counter, almost over the heads of customers; the salami of Damocles, she thought …

  The Corriere would give her half an hour in the opaque realms of Italian politics; a world of Byzantine intrigues and endless feuds, operatic in its intensity. She scanned the front page and noticed a trailer for an interview on an inside page. A well-known politician, now disgraced, was speaking about his fall from power. It was a bad decision, he said, to replace him; the country needed him more than ever, and the attempts to prosecute him were symptomatic of the ingratitude for which the country was becoming so famous. Isabel smiled. She never ceased to be amazed by the antics of politicians. It was as if politics were all about them, and not about ordinary members of the public who were, after all, the people whom politicians were meant to serve. People like me, she thought—sitting here drinking coffee, waiting to be served by politicians … She closed her eyes and imagined the Prime Minister, in a waiter’s apron, serving coffee. Martha, curiously, came into the picture, shaking her head and saying disapprovingly, “They’ll do anything for votes, won’t they?”

  She opened her eyes a few seconds later to see Eddie standing in front of her holding a replacement cup of coffee.

  “I assumed you wanted a refill,” he said. He spoke normally now, the attempt to affect an American accent being abandoned.

  Isabel smiled at him and took the proffered cup. Eddie hesitated, glancing around the shop to see if there was anybody needing attention. But, seeing that there was nobody waiting to be served, he sat down on the chair recently vacated by Martha. “That woman you were with looks familiar. Who is she?” he asked, nodding his head in the direction of the door.

  “She’s called Martha Drummond.”

  Eddie made a face. “I didn’t like her. Sorry, I know she’s your friend, but she behaved like a real cow just now.”

  “That’s possibly a bit unfair,” Isabel said. “She’s not all that bad.”

  “I can tell you don’t think that,” said Eddie. “Your eyes looked different when you said it.”

  I’m a bad liar, thought Isabel. That was twice in the last few minutes that she had been accused of insincerity. “All right,” she confessed. “I’ll admit it: she gets on my nerves a bit. A lot, sometimes. I feel guilty about my attitude towards her. I’m not proud of it. But you know how it is? We all have people in our lives we don’t really choose as friends but with whom we’re, well, lumbered, I suppose. Heart-sink friends. Have you heard that expression?”

  Eddie had, and yes, he knew a few people like that. There had been a boy in his year at school, he said, who smelled of fish but who always wanted to sit next to him in class. “He had this condition, you see. It wasn’t that he didn’t wash—he did—it’s just that he smelled of fish. It was a medical condition, see.”

  Isabel said she had heard of it.

  “One of the teachers told us about it,” Eddie went on. “Apparently people who have it can’t break down some sort of chemical and that’s what makes them smell. It’s not their fault.”

  He looked at Isabel as if to challenge her to refute the proposition that smell has nothing to do with fault. And that was right, she thought, though only in respect of smells we could not help; those we could help were our responsibility; soap was readily available, and water too. A paper in the Review, perhaps? Responsibility for the body? Do we have a moral obligation to look—and smell—as good as we can manage? In one view, this could be a Kantian duty to the self, but in another it could be part of our duty not to offend those around us—one of those items of good social manners that strayed into the scope of morality proper. Of course, that had all sorts of ramifications. What about wearing clothes that offended other people—clothes that revealed bad colour coordination, for example? Was that wrong? Surely not, although wearing scanty clothing in sensitive settings was another matter. When important women went to see the Pope, they dressed conservatively out of respect for … for what? Now it became even more complicated: the following of a dress code that treated women as potential temptresses revealed an acceptance of a whole attitude towards women that some did not condone. So had the Pope any right, Isabel wondered, to expect women to dress in a particular way when they called on him? That raised the question of whether the hosts could dictate the dress of their guests—and they could, Isabel considered, because people were always telling their invitees what to wear: black tie, casual-smart and all the rest of the signals were everyday examples of precisely that. So the Pope had the right, if he wished, to expect a certain sort of dress on the part of his visitors. And so did everybody else, it seemed. She smiled; that sorted that out.

  Eddie could tell that Isabel’s mind was elsewhere. It was chronic, he thought. She’s always thinking about all sorts of really stupid things. He continued, “The teacher said that we needed to know about it because she didn’t want people saying anything to him. He was called Julian, which was bad luck too, because that’s not a name that many people have where I come from.”

  “I’m sure you were kind to him,” Isabel said. “It must be a pretty difficult condition.”

  Eddie hesitated. “Some people tried to be kind,” he said. “Not everybody, though. There was this boy called Derek who was a real thug. People hated
him. He used to call out ‘Look out, rotten fish!’ whenever Julian came near.”

  “Children are like that,” Isabel said. “We were tremendously cruel. All of us.” She took a sip of her coffee. “What happened to Julian?”

  Eddie stared at her. It seemed that he had not been prepared for the question or had not understood it.

  “I mean, what did he go on to do after he left school? Do you ever see him these days?”

  Eddie frowned, and looked away. Isabel waited.

  “He topped himself,” he said quietly.

  Isabel sat quite still. Perhaps she had misunderstood. “You mean he—”

  Eddie interrupted her. “Yes. He put himself in the bath and then he got one of those electric fires and dropped it in. That was it.”

  Isabel said nothing.

  “I felt bad.”

  “I’m sure you’d done your best. You said he liked you. That must have been because you’d been good to him.”

  “Not good enough,” muttered Eddie.

  She decided not to argue with him. “I’m really sorry to hear that story,” she said.

  “He had an older brother,” said Eddie. “He’s a DJ in a club on Lothian Road, I still see him now and then. He’s got long greasy hair. It’s quite disgusting, actually. He’s called Daniel. He doesn’t really know who I am, but we still say hello to one another in the street. He has a girlfriend who rides a big Harley-Davidson.”

  Isabel listened to these almost random facts. They were the ordinary details of life, all of them quite unexceptional: the disgusting greasy hair, the club on Lothian Road—except perhaps for the Harley-Davidson-riding girlfriend—and yet it was these same mundane facts that were the background for the poignant story of Julian.

  For a few moments they were both silent. Then Eddie shrugged. “These things happen,” he said.

  Isabel inclined her head.

  “And we shouldn’t think about them too much, should we?” Eddie went on.